The Northern Command:
Crossing the Rubicon

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.May 17, 2002

The following article was published in Executive Intelligence Review magazine .

The proposal for the probably unlawful, U.S. Army Northern Command ("USNORTHCOM"), when taken in its current strategic-policy-setting, is clearly a proposal to "cross the Rubicon," a preparation to create a Caesarian military dictatorship over both the North American continent and the Caribbean, in imitation of the 49 B.C. action of Julius Caesar's setting off that civil war among Roman military forces which led to 31 B.C. establishment of the Empire of Augustus Caesar. In today's world, it is a preparation for the Pentagon to cross the Potomac one morning, to place the U.S. Attorney-General and his minions in power, reducing the President himself to a ceremonial, or even lesser figure in the configuration.

1. The Roman Precedent

There is no stretching of the comparison in this choice of an historic parallel for the currently pending adoption of USNORTHCOM, Following the 212 B.C. murder of Archimedes, during the Roman conquest of the most powerful obstacle to them, in what is today's southern Italy, the Roman legions conducted a rampage of military conquests and continually aggravated looting throughout the Mediterranean littoral.

During this period, through, and beyond the period of the attempted social reforms by the Gracchi, Italy underwent an accelerating change in its social character, paralleling the recent thirty-five-odd years transformation of the U.S., from its 1861-1965 character as a producers' society, to its post-1965 shift into becoming an increasingly parasitical and decadent consumer society. Typical of the decadence of the Roman social order since the beginning of the Second Punic War, was the consolidation of the power of an emergent, new ruling class, one based on the combination of wealth and power acquired through looting abroad and the spread of slavery. Italy shifted into becoming a parasites' economy, subsisting by looting conquered peoples, and maintaining political support for the Roman regime at home through instruments of moral, political, and economic decadence akin to the mass-media-entertainment culture of the U.S. today. The attempted reforms by the Gracchi, were the last significant effort to reverse the tide of decadence.

The defeat of the Gracchi, through assassinations conducted by the so-called democratic party representing the Roman predator class, unleashed a succession of civil wars within the Roman military class. Cicero's leadership against the Cataline conspiracy was the last significant effort to halt that process. Julius Caesar's rise to power through the toppling of Cicero, unleashed the process leading, through a constant state of civil warfare among Rome's military commanders, into Octavian's seizure of power as Augustus Caesar. Amid this process, Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon had broken the barrier which had shielded the city of Rome itself from the direct, full force of Nazi-SS-style military dictatorship.

The U.S. posse comitatus doctrine of law may be properly viewed as the U.S. government's recognition of the danger of allowing the circumstances under which corrupt elements of the Federal government might act to established a military dictatorship in the U.S.A. To breach that posse comitatus rule, under the circumstances of presently rampant, rising, crisis-stricken decadence in the U.S., is, in effect, to "cross the Rubicon."

Look at those present circumstances against an important lesson from the past.

2. The Utopian Degeneracy of America

1. Under the radiating influence of H.G. Wells (The Open Conspiracy) and Wells' pact with Bertrand Russell, the idea of setting up a parody Roman-imperial style world government grew. From Wells' first published proposal, in 1913, for the development and use of nuclear weapons to terrify nations into abandoning national sovereignty in favor of world government, and the subsequent notion of using air power, as in Wells' fictional Things to Come, to deliver such weapons, a massive corruption spread among the English-speaking military and others. The dropping of two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, gave impetus to the policy of "preventive nuclear war" (using air power) as set forth in Russell's September 1946 theses published in his lackey Leo Szilard's The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Around this idea, there grew up the phenomenon which President Dwight Eisenhower came to describe as a utopian "military-industrial complex." What Eisenhower referenced thus, is a complex of foundations, universities, military circles, and corporate oligopolies of military-industrial concentration, around Russell's 1938-founded Unification of the Sciences project.

Around these utopian conceptions, and figures such as John J. McCloy, Leo Szilard, and Harvard's "Old Fagin," Professor William Yandell Elliott, and the pack of "Artful Dodgers" typified by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and Henry A. Kissinger, the rising tide of utopians projected a new style in military forces, and in warfare, modelled upon the twin precedents of the Roman imperial legions and the Nazi international Waffen-SS. Thus, we have seen protracted warfare, like that of decadent ancient Rome in post-MacArthur Korea and in post-Eisenhower, and post-Kennedy Indo-China. Post-Eisenhower détente, as associated with McCloy, Kissinger, et al., typifies the institutionalization of a permanent state of warfare akin to practice under the Roman imperial legions.

Following the globally turbulent, 1961-1964, initial phase of post-Eisenhower unleashing of the utopian policy, the recent thirty-eight years have been dominated by an intentional transformation of the U.S. and its allied partners from the successful, 1945-1965 interval of post-war economic reconstruction as a producer society, into the increasing, 1966-2002 decadence of a presently doomed form of consumer society.

Just as the increasing decadence of the Roman citizen, under the rule of the new wealthy class, made possible the citizen's corrupted submission to the conditions following the Second Punic War, so the irrationality of a so-called "post-industrial," consumer society, has introduced the same descent into ever-deeper decadence which has afflicted the populations of Europe, the Americas, and Japan, most notably, over the course of the 1966-2002 interval.

A qualitative up-shift in the implementation of this post-1965 pattern of decadence, was unleashed during the interval of the 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet system. The English-speaking utopian leadership took that change as the occasion for lurching toward the foreseeable establishment of an English-speaking, global parody of a Roman Empire, a process called "globalization" in a post-nation-state world. In mimickry of ancient imperial Rome, these utopians intend to use a new type of professional military force, modelled in fact upon the Nazi international Waffen-SS, as an instrument of perpetual warfare deployed, under the cover of utopian modes of air-power, on a global scale.

3. 'Eripme' Is Empire Written Backwards

It is typical of today's Wall Street and Federal Reserve System, that they forecast backwards. The glory of U.S. power toward which they yearn, is the glory we enjoyed in the past, during and immediately following World War II. In their dreams, they look backwards, and call it the future. These are the augurs of the "No Future" society, are viewing the prospect before their backward eyes from their perch at the brink of doom. The economic system on which they perch is doomed.

That is not to suggest that the nation, or civilization generally is necessarily doomed. It is the utopians' monetary-financial system which is doomed. Under new leadership, comparable, more or less, to what President Franklin Roosevelt symbolizes, the economy and the nations could recover, through a process of reconstruction, to prosperity and safety. The utopians' system could not survive. The danger is, that they might have sufficient power to take rest of the world down with them. The USNORTHCOM proposal expresses the intention to bring about, in fact, exactly such doom for this nation ad much of the rest of the world, if not all, besides.

Today's utopian "Miniver Cheevy's" have arrived on the stage of current history, much, much too late.

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